Need help understanding video settings terminology

[The Stealthinator]

Can someone give me a brief description of what these settings in video games mean, what they do and what would be the best option to set them to?

-Anisotropic filtering
-Light Bloom
-V sync
-Color depth
-Anti-aliasing
-Texture compression
-Screen resolution
-Mip mapping
-Lighting model
-Texture detail level
-Triple buffering
-Depth buffer
-Response time

Thanks in advance. I will be selecting best answer.

 

[silverliquicity]

http://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_10.html

This isnt everything you asked for on your list but i hope it helps.

 

[The Stealthinator]

Thanks for that. It helped to an extent.

 

[Scott_D_Bowen]

Mip mapping just means storing the textures at different resolutions, as the further away they are the less pixels they use 'in scene' for a given resolution.
- Most video cards drivers do this transparently now and combine it with Anisotropic filtering.

 

[keremidko]

-Anisotropic filtering - improves texture quality when viewing objects at an angle
-Light Bloom - makes lightning look more camera-like
-V sync - means vertical synchronization, removes image tearing when moving the frame
-Color depth - how many bits represent a color in a given pixel
-Anti-aliasing - smooths the edges of 3D objects
-Texture compression - not entirely sure what this is but i think just a way of storing textures
-Screen resolution - number of pixels shown on the screen
-Mip mapping - textures have smaller resolution textures accompanying them in order to render the picture faster and remove aliasing
-Lighting model -
-Texture detail level - the resolution of the textures, improves the quality of the textures
-Triple buffering - having more than one buffer to hold data, reducing artifacts
-Depth buffer - assigns 3rd axis coordinates of 3D objects in a picture, so that the GPU can know what is visible and what to render.
-Response time - time it takes for the monitor to update input from the GPU

It really depends on your GPU and the game you are playing, there isn't a best option. You should experiment with each game to see which settings suit your PC's performance. Bare in mind that Anti-aliasing and screen resolution have the biggest impact on the performance.

 

[The Stealthinator]

Thanks for your two replies. Keremidko was helpful.

 

[The Stealthinator]

Best answer selected by The Stealthinator.